This seems less of a 'socialized medicine' problem and more of a 'rural medicine' problem, which you folks also have down south.

There is insufficient evidence to justify your point of a black eye however small, nor do I believe this has anything to do with social based health care.

Especially given the overall tone of the People article, a better article looking at this case is in the Globe and Mail http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090320.RICHARDSONCHRONO20/TPStory/

You seemed to be looking for something that isn't there to begin with.

>> ^NicoleBee:
This seems less of a 'socialized medicine' problem and more of a 'rural medicine' problem, which you folks also have down south.

Yes, but she was at the Mont Tremblant Resort, which is a tourist attraction. http://www.tremblant.ca/index.htm

And, down south, we actually had ("had" because I no longer live there) great hospital care. We had helicopters that fly you to your hospital, and when my uncle was ill before I was even born they had a helicopter fly him from Florida to Duke University Hospital. And most hospitals have a trauma center inside of them. In fact, I've never been inside one that didn't. Just pointing that out.

I'd be willing to bet there are more Americans who die because of hospital delays than Canadians. There are a couple of prominent scenes in Sicko which illustrate this. Of course, it's never news until a celebrity dies.

For the record, it doesn't necessarily have to be socialized medicine. I'd be OK with single-payer also.

Well, I don't know about this particular case, but I can confirm that the Canadian healthcare system isn't exactly the flawless utopia that Michael Moore makes it out to be in Sicko. (I know, right? Michael Moore exaggerate the truth? Never!)

People have to remember that the Canadian health care system has been intentionally starved of adequate funding since 1993. Pre-1993 wait-lists, for example, were unheard of. At some point, perhaps in the event of a Harper majority government, the public relations blitz campaign against public health will begin.

Note: Our current Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently was head of a corporate lobby group (rumoured to front for US HMOs) called the National Citizens Coalition. One of their central aims is to destroy public health in Canada and replace it with a for-profit medical system.

>> ^blankfist:
And most hospitals have a trauma center inside of them. In fact, I've never been inside one that didn't. Just pointing that out.

That's just not true. What most hospitals have is an Emergency Room, which is definitely not the same as a Level 1 trauma center. And most ERs are overburdened with patients waiting for care, some for hours. This is because of a lack of basic medical services in the community, which are typically provided by social services.

Prior to Katrina, there was only one Level 1 trauma center in the city of New Orleans, located at Charity Hospital. Today, there are none. The only one in the Greater New Orleans area is now in Jefferson Parish. My info on the medical services in New Orleans is admittedly spotty - dotdude can probably shed more light on this. But the fact remains that fully functional trauma centers are not nearly as common as you claim.

[edit] As of Dec 18, 2008, there are about 115 Level 1 trauma centers in the United States. source: http://www.emsmagazine.com/web/online/Emergency-Department/New-Orleans-Regains-Level-1-Trauma-Center/24$8669

^My mistake. I rescind my comment and stand corrected. I was, in fact, speaking of emergency rooms, not trauma.

In fairness, most ERs are perfectly capable of dealing with the majority of patients that come through their doors -- heart attacks, bone fractures, etc. The Level 1 designation is a "stamp of approval" from the American College of Surgeons, given to trauma centers that can handle anything, from gun shot wounds to someone run over by a train to especially infectious diseases.

The more important point I was making is that with our current system, a very large number of people use the ER as their primary care. The kind of services needed to change that are just not particularly profitable, especially when dealing with low and middle income patients. This is one of the bigger reasons that our for-profit medical system is so screwed up. Basing the quality of care people get on a quarterly bottom line is not just morally wrong, it's more expensive in the long run.

ive been working in ER's for a long long time.
biggest problems i observe that could probably be fixed with available affordable services and some preventative education
1) an undereducated public
2) the ER docs never (yes, i said never) consider the cost effectiveness of their treatment
3) people do use the ER as their primary care and cant/dont/wont pay the bill

and i can see rural hospitals having more of a problem with this if there is no trauma center nearby. i dont know of any rural areas that dont have access to a life flight service. that doesnt mean they dont exist somewhere.

i dont know, i feel like things like this happen all the time in the states too. patients leave AMA all the time and refuse treatment.

>> ^jonny:


Here, I'd disagree with you. I don't think the issue is allowing free market to handle health care, but rather the federal regulations in emergency medicine have become the issue. Things like HMOs were the result of government intervention which injected corporatism into our health care market. Remember, the marketplace didn't create corporations, the government did.

It's no secret Pharmaceutical companies have colluded with policy makers to stop the reimport of drugs from foreign countries which would save us loads in pharmaceutical costs alone. Congress needs to cut its subsidies to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, because they're not helping to make the costs more affordable, that's for sure.

The list goes on and on and on. The point is this. Everything we do in the form of labor is considered to be done for profit. That's how you create incentives for production, and this carries into the emergency medicine arena as well. Doctors aren't there for their health (pun intended). If you allow people to negotiate terms with health care providers, the costs will surely go down like they were in the 1960s before the large government oversight that started in the 70s (i.e., 1974 ERISA law).

Corporations first developed not out of government but as a response to the inherent risks of the market.

^Would be nice if you cited something credible. You say corporations developed as a response to the inherent risks of the market. Who developed them? Because even wiki refers to them as "legal entities", which I doubt could be done without the government's hand.

wiki: In the United States, "Corporate law [mid-1800s] was focused on protection of the public interest, and not on the interests of corporate shareholders. Corporate charters were closely regulated by the states. Forming a corporation usually required an act of legislature."

They've always been regulated and governed strictly. You can say it was as a response to risks in the market, but that doesn't mean they were not a created of the government.

This conversation has lost its way. Back to the point at hand.

^ "In feudal Europe, corporations were aggregations of business interests in compact, usually with an explicit license from city, church, or national leaders. These functioned as effective monopolies for a particular good or labor.

The term "corporation" was used as late as the 18th century in England to refer to such ventures as the East India Company or the Hudson's Bay Company: commercial organizations that operated under royal patent to have exclusive rights to a particular area of trade. In the medieval town, however, corporations were a conglomeration of interests that existed either as a development from, or in competition with, guilds. The most notable corporations were in trade and banking.

The effects of a corporation were similar to a monopoly. On the one hand, the ability to have sole access to markets meant that the business was encouraged (e.g., the ability to be an exclusive trader provided an incentive to the East India Company to accept financial risks in exploration) and the negative effects of competition were avoided (to take the same example, exclusive patents cut down on merchants sponsoring piracy). Innovation was stifled, however, and prices were unregulated. (In the case of patent corporations, the town or monarch was ostensibly able to regulate prices by revoking the patent, but this rarely occurred.)"

wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_(feudal_Europe) Locate from search box under 'corporation'. Scroll to 'feudal europe'.

I'll take Canada's system any day.

America's health care sucks, plain and simple.

It's cruel and greedy and oppressively expensive.

Even if you have great health care, you're still open to having the system send you to every specialist possible so they can all get their hands into your pain for a few extra bucks.

America is for assholes.

You can't be happy here unless you're a heartless mother-fucker.

This woman did not die because of "socialized" medicine. And you know better than to point to one instance to disprove an enormous issue (using a Ron Paul video does you no good either).

HMO's are exactly the opposite of what most liberals want from a government system. HMO's were a collusion of insurance industry lobbyists and capitalism-first politicians who were raking in the funds from said industry.


Try again

Socialized medicine sucks.

The US Postmaster General is now weeping to Congress that the PO has "run out of money". The USPO is a government-monopoly that claims it can no longer deliver the mail 6 days a week and wants to cut back.

Are American liberals now demanding Post Office-quality bureaucracies run the 14% of the US economy health care represents? Do they want FEMA-quality bureaucrats deciding whether your heart operation is in the budget?

The following is from a 1992 article about Canadian health care. How much worse it is today?

"Canada has had socialized medicine for 20 years, and the same pattern of deteriorating facilities, overburdened doctors, and long hospital waiting lists is clear. A quarter of a million Canadians (out of a population of only 26 million) are now on waiting lists for surgery. The average waiting period for elective surgery is four years. Women wait up to five months for Pap smears and eight months for mammograms. Since 1987, the entire country spent less money on hospital improvements than the city of Washington, D.C., which has a population of only 618,000. As a result, sophisticated diagnostic equipment is scarce in Canada and growing scarcer. There are more MRIs (magnetic resonance imagers) in Washington State, which has a population of 4.6 million, than in all of Canada, which has a population of 26 million.

"In Canada, as in Britain under socialized medicine, patients are denied care, forced to cope with increasingly antiquated hospitals and equipment, and can die while waiting for treatment. Canada controls health care costs the same way Britain and Russia do: by denying modern treatment to the sick and letting the severely ill and old die.

"Despite standards far below those of the United States, when variables such as America’s higher crime and teenage pregnancy rates are factored out, and when concealed government overhead costs are factored in, Canada spends as high a percentage of its GNP on health care as the United States. Today a growing chorus of Canadians, including many former champions of socialized medicine, are calling for return to a market-based system."

The above nonsense is not from an article, it's from some blog written by an insane person.

Socialized medicine is a good thing. Examples Scandinavia or Canada.

The basic problem with the American system, as it is now, is corruption. Health Care in the States is not about health care, it's about profit. Evidently good health care does not equal more profit, but more exploitation and deception of users does. That is why a socialized method would be better.

I don't think you pay too much tax either at all, but you pay WAY too much tax for what you get in return. (But that's a different argument).